One of the great procedural texture artists I look up to a lot is Käy Vriend. His tremendous effort in the discipline and his generosity in sharing his work has really bolstered the Substance Designer community for a long while. Recently, he released a really interesting node, which he has called the "Refine Node." It is quite a remarkable node, that can generate a very clean height map from any reference image you feed into it. To test it out, I scavenged around on the internet and in the real world to collect and create some texture photographs. Depicted above are the results, which I think are quite extraordinary. The control and quality of the height map generated through the node is fantastic. It really speeds up the process of creating a production ready material from reference photography. I can see myself using this a lot in the future and feel indebted to Käy for his tremendous efforts.

Next up on Texture Tuesday I'll be taking inspiration from the Procedural Material Contest Winner's submissions and trying learn from those to create something up to those standards of quality and efficiency. I'm sure Käy's Refine node will come in handy.